In a typical ammunition handling system serving a rapid-fire gun, the individual rounds of ammunition are accommodated on separate carriers which are serially interconnected to form a conveyor. This conveyor is trained throughout the interior of a magazine in a manner to maximize storage density. The conveyor interfaces with a transfer mechanism operating to pick rounds from the moving conveyor and provide a stream of rounds which is routed out of a magazine exit port for delivery to the gun, typically via chuting. In many system applications, spent shell casing, rather than being ejected from the system, are fed back from the gun and deposited on the previously emptied conveyor carriers for magazine storage.
It is seen that, in systems of this type, the magazine conveyor must run an extremely high velocity to keep up with the firing rate of the gun, which can exceed 60000 shots per minute. This requires a large and powerful conveyor drive train, particularly when conveying large caliber ammunition.
To reduce the velocity at which the ammunition rounds must be circulated through the magazine without sacrificing firing rate, a multi-tier or multi-bay magazine approach has been utilized. Each bay or tier is equipped with a separate ammunition conveyor whose rounds are merged with the rounds of the other conveyors into a single, gun-feeding stream. Each conveyor can then run at a fraction of the firing rate velocity. Typically however, this tiered or multi-bay approach has been single-ended, in that spent shell casings are not fed back into the magazine.
In view of the extremely high firing rates of Gatling guns, it is necessary that the magazine have a large storage capacity. This means that the magazine conveyors must be very lengthy. All of the numerous guides and sprockets necessary to train a long conveyor along a high packing density tortuous path, typically a serpentine path, throughout the magazine interior adds complexity and expense.
To dramatically reduce conveyor length without sacrificing magazine storage capacity, it has been proposed to store live ammunition rounds in a plurality of parallel channels with their exit ends arrayed in successive relation proximate a stripping conveyor. This relatively short conveyor then picks off the leading ammunition round presented at the exit end of each channel in repeating succession to make up a stream of rounds. A pusher mechanism acts against the trailing round in each channel to advance the parallel rows of ammunition rounds toward the channel exit ends. Ammunition handling systems of this type are disclosed in commonly assigned Garland et al. U.S. Pat. No. 3,720,301 and Ashley et al. U.S. Pat. No. 3,747,469. However, these systems do not accept spent shell casings back from the rapid-fire gun.